Website migration does not automatically mean losing rankings

A website migration involves moving your website from one domain to another. There are many good reasons why you might want to migrate your website, for example if you want to improve your website's structure to make navigation easier for the user, or if you are changing your global domain strategy to aid your international SEO efforts. However, it can come at a heavy cost to your SEO if you lose your domain authority and backlink history. An SEO Strategist can assist you with your website migration by producing a custom website migration guide, a redirect plan, auditing your new website while it is still in a development environment (not live yet) and – finally – validating the redirect implementation after “go live”.

Assistance with website migration can help...

When you are moving your website to a new domain or URL structure and don’t want to lose your domain authority and backlink history,

When you are completely restructuring your website and aren’t sure where to put your old pages in the hierarchy.

Why it's important to involve SEO in the website migration process

What our clients say

Flexible and innovative approaches to meet demanding goals

Webcertain has been a valued partner of Portakabin for over 20 years, providing the expertise required to help us grow our business in multiple European markets. With a wide-portfolio of websites and products, as well numerous internal stakeholders, we require flexible and innovative approaches to enable us to meet the demanding goals of each business unit. Webcertain understands our needs and our brand, and this enables the team to deliver cost-effective, adaptable solutions across SEO, PPC and website development which have played a vital role in our international growth and success.

Evelyn Hodgson

Head of Brand - Portakabin

Adapted for each market for maximum impact

We work with Webcertain to increase our brand awareness across key European markets and help us drive brand growth. Together, we have created campaigns utilising multiple channels and adapted for each target market to ensure maximum impact and relevancy to our audience. Webcertain has a great support team, who are easy to reach and very helpful in providing information. They understand our needs and provide a flexible approach that enables us to meet our goals

Hazel Goesaert

European Associate Marketing Manager - Business Machines - Fellowes

Technical and strategic expertise

Webcertain's understanding of language nuance and local culture ensures our messaging is relevant and compelling in each market we target, while staying true to our brand and highlighting our USPs. We rely on their technical and strategic expertise to develop both organic and paid search campaigns which will resonate with our audience and drive results across Europe. The team understands our goals and is proactive in making recommendations for improvements and suggesting opportunities. We are very happy with the results and would recommend Webcertain as an ideal partner for any brand with a global reach.

Surpreet Bahl

Digital Marketing Manager - Esko

For international support, look no further than Webcertain

There are many challenges when running international campaigns and Webcertain has provided invaluable support to us when targeting countries as diverse as China, Japan and Russia, where both cultural and linguistic knowledge are paramount for success. This knowledge, combined with skills and expertise across all digital channels, enabled us to build tailored and targeted campaigns to inform and attract students from around the globe. If you're looking for SEO, SEM or translation support in multiple languages and countries, look no further than Webcertain.

Tim Jordan

VP Marketing Berlitz and ELS

What is website migration?

When you move your website from one domain to another (e.g. from .com to .co.uk), this is called website migration. There are several reasons why you might choose to undergo a website migration. You might want to improve your website's structure, in order to make navigation easier for the user and improve retention and conversions. Alternatively, you might be changing your global domain strategy to aid your international SEO efforts.

However, if done without care and attention, a website migration can result in your website losing domain authority and its backlink history, which can be disastrous for your SEO.

We will help you move one website to another so you retain the quality and backlinks from your old website with a minimum of problems. We can help you from the beginning to the end of the process, but the earlier you can get us involved, the better and more relevant our recommendations will be.

A full website migration process involves an SEO Strategist producing:

  • a migration guide tailored to your website outlining all of those potential issues and letting you know if they're likely to affect you
  • a redirection plan outlining where you need to implement redirects to make sure none of that valuable targeted “link juice” is lost
  • an audit on the new website while it is still in a development environment
  • a redirect validation to ensure all redirects have been implemented successfully according to the redirect plan

How does website migration work?

The process begins by completing a briefing questionnaire to clarify your objectives. We will need to know your website URL and the changes you wish to make. This briefing will be visible to all the team members involved with delivering the service and is the foundation for all our quality checks.

In a full migration process, an SEO Strategist will deliver the following:

  • A redirect plan listing all URLs of the current website mapped to URLs of the new website where redirects need to be implemented, explaining the choices where necessary. A full crawl of the current and new website will be carried out to compile a list of these URLs and do the mapping. Please note that the new website (still in a test environment) must be complete. Otherwise, we will not be able to complete the mapping process.
  • The final list of URLs from the new site must be delivered to our team for the redirect plan creation at least 14 days before the actual site migration takes place. 
  • A step-by-step website migration guide including best practice on redirect implementations, common migration problems with things to avoid and other recommendations relevant to this migration project.
  • An audit on the new website while still in test environment to ensure that it is free of any technical errors that could prevent the website migration from being successful.
  • A validation of redirects after “go live” to ensure that all redirects have been implemented successfully according to the redirect plan and to report on missing redirects or those which have not been implemented correctly.

Please note that we cannot guarantee your rankings will be the same after a migration; rather, this service will provide you with everything you need to ensure you get a healthy start and lose as little traffic as possible.

Webcertain Group is passionate about generating business growth for its clients in any part of the world.

A team of native speakers of all the world’s major languages works together to achieve client objectives - no one understands working with different cultures and the nuances of language in the globe’s search engines better than the Webcertain multilingual teams. Webcertain operates in 44 languages.

Benefits of working with Webcertain:

International specialist since 1997

Transparency and online portal management

No minimum contract period

No minimum order value

International know-how shared

Quick response times

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